


Little Animals

by Kit



Category: Monster Blood Tattoo Series - D. M. Cornish
Genre: F/M, factotum-spoilerage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-19
Updated: 2010-09-19
Packaged: 2017-10-12 00:52:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/119000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kit/pseuds/Kit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Europe returns to Cloche Arde, transfigured and transmogrified</p>
            </blockquote>





	Little Animals

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers! Spoilers spoilers spoilers! Spoilers for the third and final book, _Factotum_. You have been warned.

**Little Animals**

 _2010_

The door, seldom used and irregularly oiled, creaked beneath her hand. Kicking it was tolerably satisfying, in the correct pair of boots. She felt the _crack_ of it fizz up from her black equiteer heel, strange aches poking at her bones until her body ate the shock.  Wood gave as it should, still air freed to spill, musty and wistful, about her form, settling in her sleeves, between her collar and her skin.

The flag was hoisted, missives sent and the feathers of all the souls who served here ruffled to their fullest, brightest and best. The Duchess-daughter had returned to Cloche Arde—and Europe, after greetings-cursory and gazes both fevered and bleak across her demesne, found way to the factotum’s set.

Kitchen and the Alice-‘bout-houses had avoided the place, she saw. She heard it, as her breath was swiftly muffled between coatings of dust; scented it, in its staleness and in the faint traces of another body that was gone but briefly, still, and yet long to her renewed body and wearied mind. The fulgar recalled her own shock at the changes he had made, lightening her walls, filling the place with paper and potive-reek and looking always out, away. It had been weird contrast to Licurius’s lair, and yet still overwhelmed by it:  snow on a corser’s grim leavings.  _And melted away all the more quickly for that_ , she thought.    _Ah, Box-Face, you do persist._

The walls are still scuffed and shadowed, bruised by miniature frames, and at the closing of an eye she is hardly twenty again, his breathing harsh and stifled, her own caught with copper-scented glee, metal and blood both Aspexitor and astrapecrith: young, wayward; unspeakable.

“ _You_ ,” she muttered acidly, “Used to be a girl who knew how to distract herself.”  Eyelids struggling against remembered heaviness as they opened, the Branden Rose took in the room once more.

The rabbit, sole-eyed and wretchedly strung together, blinked back at her from the bed.

 “Oh-oh, beast.” Europe examined the creature crosswise, thinking it far too self possessed and queerly familiar. She sat, grunting softly in some surprise as the bed squeaked beneath her weight. Funny, that she had heard nothing so bothersome when the boy had been in residence. And Licurius had needed no such niceties, of course.  “You think to sneak in here and escape the stew pot? I have no _idea_ of the menu.”

The coney, unconcerned, flicked a bedraggled bob-tail, and blinked once more.  The Lady of Naimes remembered such creatures. Swift shadows in Brandenbrass streets; unnaturally of nature amidst the clatter and curse and clamour of it all, even at her heels during that final fight, as a man blackened beneath her fingers as easily as piano keys sounded there.

“You dredge up all sorts, filthy thing. Be gone.”

Not a stir. “Look lively, now.” Europe held out her hand over the creature’s grimed head, imagined power coalescing in her palm. “I could dispose of you myself. No need for cleaver-carvings.”

 _La! And now she talks to little animals_. The thought conjured a coach ride, and the sparrow darting—that was its name, Yes? Darter or Dasher or something equally fit for infantile pamphlets or other such fabulist messes.   

Europe, Duchess-daughter, withdrew her hand, and the rabbit closed its single, bright eye as if in consideration that no one should see anything so absurd as a lazharine pugnator weeping within the confines of a factotum’s set.  


End file.
